So small, but so resistant. This is how 24-year-old hotel maid Eve (Gabriela Cartol) is described by her colleague Miriam (Teresa Sánchez), barely flinching as she receives a violent electric shock. Scrubbing lavatories and fluffing pillows at the glamorous Hotel Presidente in Mexico City, Eve works unsociable hours in order to pay for childcare for her four-year-old son. At lunch, she limits herself to popcorn, the cafeteria’s cheapest offering. She is stoic and hardy, resistant, if not impervious, to the job’s daily grind. As with the electric shock, she grows more powerful as she absorbs it.
Lila Avilés’s droll debut feature follows Eve’s attempts to secure a promotion that would place her in charge of the hotel’s 42nd floor. There are diversions, such as an after-hours adult education programme, and a brief dalliance with a window cleaner whom she occasionally allows to admire her through glass, but mostly Eve remains diligently focused. Still, it’s a long way to the top and she must work her way up, obeying the strict hierarchies that govern the high-rise hotel. For the duration of the film, like Eve, we stay within its confines, lurking in the anonymous corridors and secret lifts that lead to the building’s bowels, seeking respite in the laundry room where towels and bed linen are stacked in wobbling white towers. We never see Eve’s commute. The days are monotonous and indistinguishable.
This is brilliantly confident film-making. Avilés does not need to leave the building to examine class tensions and cultural misunderstandings, weaving her critique through the hotel’s denizens. There is Mr Morales, a “VIP guest” who hoards miniature toiletries, an Orthodox Jew who insists Eve push the elevator button for him on the Sabbath and a kindly co-worker who teaches her how to remove stubborn blood stains.
Most infuriating is a well-meaning but brattish Argentinian woman (Agustina Quinci) who asks Eve to watch her baby while she showers. The two strike up an uneasy friendship; it’s a sincere attempt to connect when she tells Eve that she, too, would like to go back to work, but awkward as well. Both characters know their lives are not comparable.
Even more striking than Avilés’s portrayal of the hotel’s power dynamics is the way she depicts the space itself. Despite its floor-to-ceiling windows, as the film progresses the hotel begins to feel more and more claustrophobic, to the extent that, when she visits the roof in the third act, it’s like a visceral gasp of air. Working with cinematographer Carlos Rossini, the film observes Eve from various angles with a detached, almost clinical efficiency, whether we’re in bed beside her or watching her from a fixed point in the room.
Eve is, at times, ruthlessly efficient, too; in the film’s opening scene, the camera remains still as she surveys and then begins sorting through the wreckage of the night before. Her tidying is so furious that she doesn’t notice there is a man concealed beneath the covers.
Perhaps inevitably (also unfortunately), the film invites comparisons with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, another recent film about a Mexican chambermaid. Though Roma spends time with its protagonist, Cleo, outside of work, we never really get a sense of her inner life. In The Chambermaid, Eve’s desires and frustrations are consistently foregrounded.
Avilés was inspired by French artist Sophie Calle and her 1981 project L’Hôtel, in which she moonlighted as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel and photographed the objects guests had left behind. Eve is a similar voyeur, taking note of her guests’ bedside reading, pilfering their foil-wrapped sweets and examining their discarded notes as she takes out the bins. Cartol does wonders with scant dialogue, whole worlds roiling beneath Eve’s taciturn surface. Even the way she looks at a crushed plastic bottle contains a sense of studied curiosity. We experience the throb of lust as she performs a spontaneous striptease for the window cleaner and the lurch of dread when she accidentally leaks menstrual blood on to a clean sheet.
Eve collects souvenirs from her travels up and down the high-rise, none more fascinating than a red dress, abandoned by a guest and left to rot in lost property. Does she want to possess it, give it a new lease of life, or simply free it from the hotel’s clutches? Avilés won’t say. As the film simmers towards its conclusion, similar questions begin to bubble about Eve. Will the hotel spit her out or swallow her whole?
